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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28124820">my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyscaleCourtier/pseuds/GreyscaleCourtier'>GreyscaleCourtier</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Cult Upbringing Issues, Drama, Dream Sharing, F/F, Telepathic Bond, Timeline What Timeline, Title from a Hozier Song, because of course, brief mentions of Elias Bouchard unfortunately, playing fast and loose with canon events</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-20 11:55:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,418</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28124820</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyscaleCourtier/pseuds/GreyscaleCourtier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>What right did Gertrude have, years ago, to take Agnes's life and bind it to her own with spider silk and suffering?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Rusty Quill Secret Santa 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/fakeCRfan/gifts">fakeCRfan</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>playing fast and loose with the timeline here but !!! lesbians!!!! yeah!!!!!!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Scotland’s not big, but it is wild. Centuries of English dominion, the colonisation of the Celtic people and the destruction of indigenous agricultural methods have rendered it rocky and inhospitable these days. But then again, the same could probably be said of her.</p>
<p>Gertrude ties off the last totem. It’s not a permanent fix, she knows. James Wright once told her, in that self-important way,<em> Even salted earth will one day sprout grass.</em> Gertrude doesn’t need grass, she needs the Lightless Flame to sit and be quiet for a few goddamned years. This’ll do. She picks up the lighter and her backpack and starts the hike back to the road.</p>
<p>Scotland is wild, and it does not scare her. Very little does anymore.</p>
<p>The photographs of Agnes Montague in their milk bottles seem to turn in the breeze to watch her go.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>Emma’s gone wrong.</p>
<p>Gertrude should have seen it sooner. She’s been busy, of course, but that’s no excuse. With the Circus, and the Divine Host, and even running down the Flesh’s ritual a few years back — she’s gotten lazy. So focused on the adversaries who announced themselves, who concocted grand schemes in the far corners of the world, that she had let the Spider into the Institute and let it build a nest right under her nose.</p>
<p>Poor Sarah. She didn’t deserve to die so uselessly.</p>
<p>Gertrude is no stranger to the End. She’s watched far more than her share of people die. She supposes she’s grown rather callous to it, but that’s her own private carnage to bear. She’s tough enough to do what no one else will. She will bear the weight of a few dead innocents if it means the world keeps turning. But only if there is a purpose to all the death. Something like Emma Harvey, something that is so senseless and curious, cannot be allowed. She’s entrenched in the Archives now. God knows what kind of information she’s fed to the Mother of Puppets. And she certainly can’t be fired. Not with the new Director, inexperienced in the power he wields. Bouchard has been around the Institute long enough to know a shadow of the truth, but Gertrude doesn’t trust him as far as she could throw him. Not with something of this magnitude. Not with the Archives compromised.</p>
<p>"Emma’s gone wrong." It’s all she says to him, sliding a leave form across his desk. (She’ll need a few days to sort it.) Elias, to his credit, eyes her more shrewdly than she thought he was capable of. He seems, for a moment, like he’s going to ask more questions, but then he just takes a pen and signs the form. “Take all the time you need,” he says. “Keep it out of the Institute. And don’t tell me how you’re going to sort it.”</p>
<p>She wasn’t going to, but she appreciates the fact that he seems to understand. She takes two statements from the Archives before she sets out. Just in case she gets shaky.</p>
<p>Agnes isn’t difficult to find.</p>
<p>Gertrude has a great many eyes — she lets herself have this one private joke — in a great many places. Sheffield is a long train ride from London, so Gertrude faffs around with her papers until she runs out of ways to shuffle them, undoes her hair and puts it back up a half dozen times, and eventually settles for staring out the window. It’s close to nightfall and she can’t see much. Just a reflection of an aging, careworn, lonely Archivist and her invisible entourage of ghosts.</p>
<p>A man across from her tries to strike up a conversation at one point. He does not do so twice.</p>
<p>Agnes is waiting just outside the train station. In spite of the night chill, she wears a skirt and no coat. Even when she’s far enough away to be nothing more than a silhouette against the brickwork, Gertrude knows it’s her the moment Agnes’s eyes rise to meet hers.</p>
<p>It feels like — it feels like the moment after striking a match, before you can tell if the flame’s caught or not. It feels like putting a map in Michael Shelley’s hands and knowing it’s the last thing he’ll ever really hold. It feels like the instant after hitting a detonator and waiting with bated breath to hear if the explosives will go.</p>
<p>Agnes Montague stares at her without a milk bottle between them. Her face is serious and drawn.</p>
<p>Gertrude explains without preamble. Emma’s gone wrong.</p>
<p>When Agnes speaks, its with a quiet thoughtfulness that belies the inferno under her skin. She knows exactly what happened to Sarah Carpenter. Gertrude doesn’t want to know the details. She asks anyway.</p>
<p>Emma had been a friend. Gertrude had hoped that there would be a single assistant who wouldn’t meet a terrible fate. That hope felt childish now, outside a Sheffield train station, shivering in the cold.</p>
<p>Agnes agrees to help. (If she's reluctant, she doesn't show it.) (If Agnes is eager to devour someone new, she doesn't show it.) (If she wants to close the distance between herself and Gertrude and put a searing hand over her mouth to silence her last screams, she doesn't show it.)</p>
<p>It feels like —</p>
<p>It feels like she’s been trapped in a cage with a wild animal for years. But now, the cage is a shared enemy. The Web may bind them together, but this, to knock over a pawn in a petty fit of unified spite, feels like something Gertrude has trouble identifying.</p>
<p>On the overnight train back to London, Gertrude tentatively names it a partnership.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>The Archives are empty now, save for her.</p>
<p>Gertrude taps at her laptop, scrolling down a list of taxidermy shops. It’s late, and it’s been days since she’s read a statement, and her hands are unsteady with it. Perhaps with age. Perhaps she’s finally developing the arthritis that crippled her grandmother. Someone came in to give a statement earlier and had seemed rather spooked by how quiet the Archives were. Gertrude couldn’t have cared less. She’d handed him a pen and a statement form and gone back to her office. She wasn’t going to ask for more assistants. And if Bouchard tried to send some her way, she’d have some choice words for him.</p>
<p>She shuts the laptop and rubs her eyes. She refuses to look at the time. It won’t make a difference. She’ll get some sleep when she gets some sleep, and that’s that. The Unknowing is coming, and she can’t afford to be caught off guard. Perhaps she ought to check the library again, take another research angle. Check the 578s — or the 504s? God, her library science is rusty. Nothing like averting a few apocalypses to knock the DDC right out of your head.</p>
<p>Gertrude spares a moment for thinking about university. The moment stretches longer, and longer still. She takes a moment to close her eyes, rest her chin on her hand. Just for a moment. Just for a breather.</p>
<p>There’s a child running through a circus. They cry and wail and scream in Russian. Gertrude watches.</p>
<p>A woman staggers down a flight of stone steps. Her hands are trembling with fear or fatigue or both, locked around a bloody, severed cow head. She shivers and cries quietly, and she does not stop walking. There is a mouth down those stairs, and if she does not feed it, it will get its meat another way. Gertrude watches.</p>
<p>An old man limps down a sand-strewn corridor. Behind him shuffles something that ought to have been left to do its work in peace beneath Alexandria. Gertrude watches.</p>
<p>She doesn’t see any of the Keays anymore, now that they’re all dead. She’s rather grateful for that.</p>
<p>Agnes Montague stands at the edge of a clearing in Scotland. She dares not enter. Milk bottles sway from their strings. Locks of hair catch the light. Rainwater bubbles. Gertrude watches.</p>
<p>But Agnes has never made a statement. Has she? No — Gertrude has taken great pains to ensure that no members of the Lightless Flame can enter her Archive uninvited. Why is Agnes here?</p>
<p>Gertrude breaks the silence. “Is this what you fear?” she asks, low and strained. (Speaking is difficult when she dreams. She’s only meant to watch.)</p>
<p>If Agnes is startled, she doesn’t show it. (If Agnes is a rupturing sun, she doesn’t show it.) (If Agnes’s blood is molten lead, she doesn’t show it.) (If Agnes is afraid, she doesn’t show it.)</p>
<p>“Afraid of you? No.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps you ought to be.” Gertrude steps into the clearing. The trees she planted all those decades ago have grown strong and tall and lush. “Jude is. Arthur is.”</p>
<p>Agnes seems to mull that over. Her eyes meet Gertrude’s. It feels like —</p>
<p>It feels like being grabbed by the shoulder an instant before you fell into the street. It feels like being on a carousel at the height of the music, careening through a riot of color and sound and motion. It feels like walking up familiar stairs that are suddenly one step less, and where her shoe should have found stable ground there is only empty air.</p>
<p>Agnes seems to come to a decision. “I don’t fear you,” she says, quietly, evenly. “That’s why I came.”</p>
<p>Gertrude reaches down and brushes imaginary dust from the altar. “As a test of courage? To confront the Archivist on her own ground, perhaps?”</p>
<p>Agnes watches Gertrude’s every movement, tracking her with a gaze that feels as though it gives off real, tangible heat. “To say what I want,” she says. “Without being listened to. I want—” She stops, suddenly, then continues slowly and carefully, forming every word as though it’s the first time she’s ever spoken it. “I wish that things had gone differently.”</p>
<p>Gertrude cottons on. “You don’t want your destiny,” she says.</p>
<p>Agnes is unreadable. “I don’t get to want things,” she says. It sounds like she’s reciting a well-learned catechism. “I never did. I didn’t know anything else. I didn’t know that wanting was something I was allowed to do.”</p>
<p>“And you don’t want to be a messiah of the Desolation,” Gertrude finishes, but Agnes shakes her head, auburn hair gleaming under the Scottish sun.</p>
<p>“It isn’t that. They deserve — they need me. I carry the Flame.”</p>
<p>So Agnes came to... express doubts, perhaps, in the one place her cult couldn’t eavesdrop, to the only person who could understand. Who could See her. Gertrude pats the altar beside her. “Come. Sit.”</p>
<p>Agnes moves into the clearing, but she doesn’t sit. She stands looking at one of the bottles, clinking against its tree as it moves in the breeze. The sun glints off the glass and sends dazzling reflections dancing across her face. Inside the milk bottle, Gertrude’s own face stares out.</p>
<p>They both stay silent for a while.</p>
<p>“For what it’s worth,” Gertrude says, “I also wish things had gone differently for you.”</p>
<p>Agnes looks back down at Gertrude.</p>
<p>“But there’s no changing the past. Goodness knows we’d all like to.” Gertrude stands up. “But here we are, regardless. Tell me, Agnes. If you were allowed to want things, what would you want?”</p>
<p>Agnes’s hand shoots out and curls around Gertrude’s wrist.</p>
<p>There’s always a moment, when you touch something that burns you, between when you touch it and when you feel the pain. It’s enough time to panic, to snatch your hand away, to start to scream, before the pain hits.</p>
<p>It feels like —</p>
<p>It feels like a hand.</p>
<p>There’s no following searing blast of pain. There’s no white-hot stab of agony, no sizzle, no melting skin, no burning hair, no reek of cooking flesh.</p>
<p>Agnes’s hand is warm and firm and dry, and if she is holding back the rage of a blast furnace, she doesn’t show it. (If Agnes is smothering the inferno in her soul, she doesn’t show it.) (If Agnes is dying, she doesn’t show it.) (If Agnes wants anything, she doesn’t show it.)</p>
<p>Gertrude looks back up, meets eyes that fall on her with a gaze like heavy, red-hot coals.</p>
<p>"I want--" Agnes starts, then stops. She struggles visibly for words.</p>
<p>Gertrude waits.</p>
<p>"I don't know." Agnes doesn't look away as she admits it. "Too many choices were made for me. I don't know if I know how to want anything."</p>
<p>There's blame in her voice, somewhere, and Gertrude turns to look at a milk bottle full of river dirt. She remembers collecting it decades ago. It's been scorched black by its time in the circle, likely more charcoal than soil by now.</p>
<p>What right did she have, years ago, to take Agnes's life and bind it to her own with spider silk and suffering?</p>
<p>Agnes's gaze burns like the beam of a lighthouse. Like searchlights in a prison parking lot. "Look at me," she says. Her voice is calm and quiet. (A candle burns quiet until it catches hold of a curtain.) (A red-hot iron makes no sound until a smith puts it in a bucket of water.) (A leaking gas stove is silent until a spark finds it.)</p>
<p>Gertrude looks at her.</p>
<p>"No," says Agnes. "<em>Look</em> at me. I... I want to be seen."</p>
<p>Gertrude likes to think there's nothing left to frighten her. But she'll never be able to fully explain away the fluttering in her chest as she leans into the range of Agnes's lethal presence and kisses her cheek.</p>
<p>There's no pain tied to it. There's no boiling flesh, no melting skin. The place where Gertrude's lips met Agnes's desolate flesh steams for a moment, then there's nothing. Gertrude can see her now, in her entirety, in her beauty, in her destruction. (If Agnes is trembling, Gertrude can see it.) (If Agnes is beginning to cry, her tears evaporating from the surface of her red-rimmed eyes, Gertrude can see it.) (If Agnes is finally knowing what it is like to be Known, Gertrude can see it.)</p>
<p>For a shining moment, Gertrude feeds her god the knowledge of what Agnes Montague wants.</p>
<p>She's gone the next instant. Woken, perhaps, by some devotee, or by Jude Perry, or a rat in the walls of her shabby Sheffield flat. Gertrude wakes herself with a shake, and goes to check if the statement giver from earlier is finished yet.</p>
<p>His name is Ivo Lensik. His statement will be about uprooting a tree on Hill Top Road.</p>
<p>Gertrude will read about Agnes Montague's death two days later.</p>
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